People are always coming up to me and asking me to help them with their decks. If I have the time I will usually do so. Almost inevitably, I am faced with the challenge of asking to take out one or two of their favorite cards from the deck. It's their deck, and almost inevitably I see them in the next tournament, still playing the Zalkonian Storage Capsule or whatnot.

The first thing I look at when building a deck; what is the deck's objective?

There are a lot of deck themes; targeted skills elimination, armada, speed, personnel battle, mission stealing, avoiding ref cards, force the DH, and many more. When looking over someone's deck, I always try to figure out which one of these they are trying to do. Often however, they haven't got one.

I've noticed a trend. The players who don't win haven't figured out a theme. The players who sometimes win have a couple of unfocussed themes. The players who win often, have one theme and they do it well, better than their opponents.

I'm sure I'm not the first to realize this instinctively, but I don't think I've ever seen in in
print. I'm just as certain that a lot of players could profit from thinking about it.

Olav's Law: "Every Deck Should Do One Thing And Do That One Thing As Well As Possible."

Now what that means is that cards that don't help you complete that objective should not go in the deck.

Let me give you an example. Worlds 99. I was sharing the hotel room of one Mr. Michael McLeod. Now, Michael had qualified for worlds through a series of misinterpretations of the rules, and was kind of clueless. He asked me to look over his monstrous (like 1000 card) Pire-for-hire-calamarain-rogue-borg-mercenaries-outgunned-I-don't-remember-what-else-deck.

Now the theme of this deck was obvious: mass up a decent armada, outgun the opponent and draw a ton of cards with Fajo's Gallery. The Calamarains would hit the opponent's shields with target shields (as a tactic) and the interceptors would come in for the outgun.

Now looking through the deck, I was certain that (for one thing) latinum payoff should not be in the deck.  But Michael was adamant. If he solved a particular combination of three of his missions, he would be 5 points from winning. He needed those five points, so he stocked ten latinum payoffs. He also felt that since Fajo's Gallery could potentially draw him such a large number of cards that he should have some sort of protection against scorched hand. He settled on Zalkonian Storage Capsules.

Now, he had a theme. But he didn't pursue it to the exclusion of all else. He was too worried about what would happen *after* his deck had done what he intended to, and not worried enough about making the deck do it's thing reliably. That was when I first started thinking about the concept of this rule.

I've realized over the years that when a deck can do that one thing better and faster than any other deck, then the game should be over and everything else should be a mop up effort. I wouldn't care if it's a 3 mission win or a four mission win if I'm building an armada deck, as long as my opponent's outpost, ships and away teams have been eliminated before they manage to do whatever the one thing their deck does well first.

Hence the predominance of Combo Scows in decks that I build; unless I've decided to do dilemmas as my "one thing" then seedslots are going to be used elsewhere so that my deck will do whatever "one thing" I've decided on; ASP to staff ships in an armada, ASP for youth in DDR, ASP for Ty Kjada in Q-bypass. It's all good. If I'm playing a dilemma centered deck, I will seed 24 of them.

If you are looking at a card and saying to yourself "this will be great after [insert the deck's "one thing"] happens" then ask yourself "is it really necessary, or can I do without? Will I lose guaranteed if I don't have it? A good example of this is the card "Victory is Life" in a Dominion Smackdown Deck. Sure it has a cool function  after you have won a battle, but it doesn't help you win that battle, so you are slightly more likely to lose the battle in the first place. It isn't something that you require to be able to win once you have smacked down your opponent, so lose it. Never play that card.